Poles projected their own collaboration with Germans onto Jews as alleged Soviet collaboration.

Evidence

One explanation offered for the murderous hostility some Poles felt toward the country’s Jewish population is that it was in revenge for the Jews’ alleged collaboration with the earlier and extremely brutal Soviet occupation of 1939–41. Historian Jan Gross (2001), however, found no evidence to support the claim that a disproportionate number of Jews cooperated with the Soviets. Instead, he found ample evidence for a different wartime collaboration. He concluded that in eastern Poland, “it is manifest that the local non-Jewish population enthusiastically greeted entering Wehrmacht units in 1941 and broadly engaged in collaboration with the Germans.” Gross goes on to say that “it appears that the local non-Jewish population projected its own attitude toward the Germans in 1941 … onto an entrenched narrative about how the Jews allegedly behaved vis-à-vis the Soviets in 1939.” — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2334

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A devastating real-world case where a group’s own guilt is displaced onto an outgroup and then punished — projection with lethal historical consequences, not just a laboratory phenomenon.
• XREF: This is an extreme real-world instantiation of the scapegoat/displacement mechanism; connects to Allport’s own frustration-aggression and ‘Jews as common scapegoat’ analysis in the parent book. — connects to: Over twelve million ethnic Germans were expelled from postwar Europe — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1530
• FICTION: The imagined ‘who collaborated’ accusation spiral between two occupied communities is rich material for historical fiction — each side’s guilt projected onto the other.